


Reverse Evolution

by paperbackmummy



Category: Deadwood
Genre: Anxiety Disorder, Depression, Drug Addiction, Hallucinations, Multi, Yuletide 2007
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-11
Updated: 2013-02-11
Packaged: 2017-11-28 22:44:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/679706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperbackmummy/pseuds/paperbackmummy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things are shifting back and her grasp is loosening and her chest aches like the splitting of wood</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reverse Evolution

**Author's Note:**

> Written for: Jae W. in the Yuletide 2007 Challenge

 

 

The camp's torches sound like whispers.

Below her head, Mr. Farnum is sweating and stuttering. She can see his hair wriggling out from beneath his hat, like dozens of small snakes waiting to wrap their tiny bodies around his vile frame. She sees them slide carefully down the pulse of his neck, their split tongues slipping in and out, grazing putrid flesh. She hiccups a breath as a laugh over takes her. The sight of him, in fits and shakes as his life is wrung from his body, brings a delirious joy. She pictures the line for supper as it winds around the dining room and bite by bite the meals are consumed while poor Mr. Farnum struggles in view of the thoroughfare. 

It's only a thought. A split second fantasy in overwhelming detail, leaving as quickly as it came. It will do her this evening as her sheets tangle gracelessly around her ankles and bind her to town. 

 

 

She uses her fingertips to swipe softly over her eyelids. Her heavy eyelids; heavier than coins, heavier than gold, heavier than blood. These are my hands, she tells her self, these are my hands and my wrists and my arms and my body. My bodies. I have this body. I use this body. I wear this body. 

Her fingertips slide over the bridge of her nose, the swell of her cheek, the jut of her chin. Cleanliness is next to Godliness and she is next in line. A long line, a line far longer for some than for others. 

A spoonful, two spoonfuls. A warmth, a glow cradling the back of her skull, snaking fingers under her skin and through her hair, trailing down through her spine and settling in a liquid pool near the small of her back; a bright, hot spring she can dive into to find pearls and pages and fingernails nestled at the bottom.

From her window she can see the torches flicker aimlessly like breaths just after a cough or a laugh or a death. 

 

 

She thinks she slurs her words as the Doctor sets the bottle down and she offers a proper goodbye of words she knows and words she's heard and words she knows she's heard but doesn't recall ever learning. As she lifts her chin the world shifts a fraction and it is new all over again. 

This newness she feels sucks at her fingertips and the short hairs at the back of her neck. It leeches the air from the room and breaches the here and there and forces flour and ashes down her throat until she's nearly choking on it and tears leak from the corners of her eyes. 

Doctor Cochran asks her questions she can answer in passing and leaves her with a nod and an odd shuffle that lights her mind to imagine feeling a pinch in the soft skin on her inner arms. Things are shifting back and her grasp is loosening and her chest aches like the splitting of wood. 

 

 

She uses her body, my body uses me. She thinks this as she stares intently at the woman outside of The Gem, with her knotted hair and crooked limbs and marred flesh. And she desires the woman; the body, the idea, the heat. If she slipped a hand underneath the folds of thin fabric would she find what she's looking for; a hand, a fire, a hammering beneath her own skin.

If she could press herself flush against the body of this woman, feel the swell of her breasts rising and falling against her own, would the warmth seep through from one body into another, filling them both. And would they walk away as fictions of themselves. 

She finds these thoughts to be unsettling and incendiary and she wants to keep them, shoved inside herself haphazardly. She will never touch her, this slippery treacherous version of the whore across the way, but she will think about it. She will touch her own thigh and it won't be the thigh she's known all her life. She knows her desires are the desires of others are the desires of no one. She desires no one and nothing and chaos. 

 

 

She thinks her room is getting smaller. She measures the length of the floor with her body. It is shrinking or she is growing or the world is collapsing in on itself and she is the only object that remains unchanged. 

She is the crack in the ceiling that expands and contracts. She feels the snap of her bones and the slick of her skin keeping them confined. Inside her there is a breakdown of parts she can see in the translucent gauze stretched taut across her chest. As her heart beats, she watches it strain and struggle to break through. And she pushes her garments aside to aid in its exodus from her body.

Naked and aging she waits for the consummate dissolution of mind and body and force; for the collapse to ravage her and leave her in perfect ruin. In ruin comes a cleanliness she can't find in water. 

 

 

His skin feels paper thin and dry and she closes her eyes against the rolling awareness of dispassion. She thinks of the woman from the Gem, her winding blonde hair and down turned mouth and liquid eyes. They would touch with purpose, she and the woman, and tear skin from limbs and scratch deep crevices into the thin flesh behind knees, elbows, ears.

She's patient and exhausted and laid bare to the room and her husband. Her mind slips free from her skull and spreads itself beneath her. She lies spellbound as it's absorbed into her skin and travels the course of her body, leaving her twitching and restless.

The bedding feels like a palm pressing her into the mattress and her breath exits in fits and spurts and she's drowning in her own humors. She tries to blink away the fog across her eyes and drags a hand across her slick skin and prays for rain and waits as the wind etches psalms down her spine.

Her fingertips touch the sound of the torches being lit. Her breasts taste the salt from the mud. And she knows that the end devours what has come before and she's starting over and the tilt and collapse will leave her silent and still.


End file.
